Was Steve Jobs Smart? Heck Yes!

There's been some discussion about whether or not Steve Jobs was "conventionally" smart. It all started with Walter Isaacson's statement in the New York Times:

"So was Mr. Jobs smart? Not conventionally. Instead, he was a genius."

Christopher Shea at the Wall Street Journal and Sean Carroll at Discover have brought up some interesting points about this which are definitely worth a read, but for now the question remains: Was Steve Jobs conventionally smart?

I think what people mean when they mention conventional smarts is basically general intelligence or an IQ score. All an IQ score represents is a rough rank order of where a person falls in a general intelligence sense among the population.

"Steve Jobs likely had an IQ roughly 160 or above. In Walter Isaacson's biography, near the end of 4th grade Jobs was tested. Jobs said: 'I scored at the high school sophomore level.' This means he was a 4th grader performing at the 10th grade level. The average 4th grader is 9 or 10 years old and the average 10th grader is 15 or 16 years old. Using the standard mental age/chronological age x 100 = IQ formula, we can create rough boundaries. Lower bound: 15/10 x 100 = 150 IQ. Upper bound: 16/9 x 100 = 178 IQ. Average of the bounds is 164 IQ. Of course, if Jobs was a young 4th grader then his IQ would be even higher. Steve Jobs clearly had exceptional intelligence, regardless of what his exact IQ score was. This makes sense, considering that Bill Gates, the other wunderkind, said 'Software is an IQ business.'"

In 2010, the world population was roughly 6,840,507,000. An IQ of 160 places Steve Jobs in the 99.99th percentile or above as a rough lower bound. Let's do some simple math: .9999 x 6,840,507,000 = 6,839,822,949.3. This means that Steve Jobs was conventionally smarter than about 6,839,822,949 people on earth.

Steve Jobs was not "the 99 percent" intellectually or financially.

So was Steve Jobs smart? In the famous words of Napoleon Dynamite, "Heck Yes!"

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Note: A perceptive reader pointed out that ratio IQ scores (what I calculated above) are not the same thing as deviation IQ scores. Hence, according to this table, a ratio IQ of 160 should actually translate into a deviation IQ of about 150. An IQ of 150 is at about the 99.9th percentile rather than the 99.99th percentile. .999 x 6,840,507,000 = 6,833,666,493. So perhaps Steve Jobs was only conventionally smarter than 6,833,666,493 people on earth.

What nonsense. You're basing this on....what Jobs said about one of his 4th grade "tests"? You need an IQ test to estimate general intelligence, not the anecdotes of someone about his score decades ago when he was 10 years old. Please.

And Jobs's job did not require that much brains to begin with. The hard part was done by Wozniak and Apples' engineers. Jobs was merely a ad man and general manager.

What Jobs said is probably the best evidence we have of an IQ score. Basic standardized tests given to students in school are essentially IQ tests (or general intelligence tests) so it is reasonable to make the estimate that I did. I agree that Wozniak deserves the credit for invention and may indeed be smarter in an IQ sense than Jobs, but it is a mistake to think that selling or being a manager does not require high intelligence. What is more interesting is that Jobs's biographer (Walter Isaacson, whose books I am a huge fan of and deeply respect) claimed Jobs was a genius while simultaneously claiming that Jobs was not conventionally smart. I would not call Jobs a genius because I think that term should be reserved for someone like Einstein. However, Jobs was certainly very intelligent and well within the top 1% of intellectual ability and wealth. If you have empirical evidence to the contrary, I would gladly welcome it! -Jon

"If you have empirical evidence to the contrary, I would gladly welcome it! -Jon"

If you have empirical evidence to support that his IQ was that high I would welcome it also. It is absurd to take him at his word that he scored as he did on an IQ test and claim it as evidence of exceptional intelligence. People often lie or misremember such things in a way that is biased towards their own self-esteem. He could of been embellishing, it could of been a test of something very specific that applied qoutients (like a test of reading comprehension), or it could of been a misattributed memory. Perhaps he was that intelligent, but you can't presume that based on what he said. You are a doctor of psychology, you are being highly speculative without indicating that clearly, you should know this.

I don't doubt that some standardized tests measure basically the same abilities as IQ tests. What I have a problem with is taking anecdotal evidence from Jobs about his own score. Especially when it's a score from 40 years ago. How accurate is his memory? How sincere are self-reported IQ scores? Not very is my answer to all these questions.

Also, Isaascon's claim that Jobs was a "genius" (marketing or promotional, I would guess) but was not "conventionally smart" seems plausible to me. He ought to know Jobs better than you. If you have Jobs' childhood scores and they indicate him being "conventionally" a genius you should base your claims on these scores, not on anecdotes from a notorious pretentious, self-promoter like Jobs. That wouldn't be scientific. That isn't even mildly plausible.

I have serious doubts that promotion requires anything resembling genius in the IQ sense. It may be loosely called genius. Mohamed Ali was the greatest self-promoter in sports history and he had an IQ of 78. You may find a plethora of other examples in the entertainment industry. Many people are very good at it but not necessarily smart by IQ standards. Likewise, many people have outrageously high IQs, and yet have little to no ability or desire to self-promote. So the implication does not seem to go through. Just because jobs was a great promoter of his vision does not make him conventionally smart by IQ standards.